By DG Bracey
At the yard sale, Annie wanted it. Housed in a box with The Spirit of St. Louis painted on top in banner-style letters. A cord ran from the box phone looking for a wall socket. Inside the box, a banana-shaped receiver rested on a hook, a compass sat under a dusty globe, a number pad awaited her finger.
“It still works,” the old lady said. “It was my late husband’s.”
Annie took it home, cleaned it up, plugged it into the wall socket that had never been used, didn’t even have service. It just felt right to plug the conversation piece in.
At 11:11pm, the Spirit of St. Louis rang—a harsh clanging. The compass arrow spun.
It crackled when Annie answered it. A distant, disembodied voice leaked through the receiver. “Are you there?”
“I’m here,” Annie said. She thought it must be a trick phone.
“I miss you.” The voice sissled.
Annie couldn’t place the foreign voice, couldn’t deny the longing, listened to the voice take a long breath through a sigh. Without thinking too much, sitting alone in her living room, she said, “I miss you too.”
Annie listened as the voice rattled along a one-sided conversation of being lost and finding new paths and tarnished love. She listened and spoke only to spur the voice until the line went dead.
But the next night, and the night after, at exactly 11:11pm, the phone rang again, and she answered again and again with a simple, “Hello.”
DG Bracey is a teacher and a freelance writer from the Carolina coast. He’s picked up a journalism degree from the University of South Carolina, an MA in Writing from Coastal Carolina University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina–Wilmington. He’s published short stories in various journals and been a feature writer for several newspapers.
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